The 1965 march to Selma, Bloody Sunday and history started 30 miles away in Marion, Alabama, with a minister’s arrest, threats of a lynching and gunfire that fatally wounded a church deacon.
FILE - In this March 1, 1965, photo, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads a procession behind the casket of Jimmie Lee Jackson during funeral rites at Marion, Ala. From left, John Lewis, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King and the Rev. Andrew Young. In 1965, Jackson was fatally shot at a protest in Marion. It was that killing that sent hundreds of people to Selma for a march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge two weeks later.
“Starting the story in Selma is like reading a book by starting in the middle and not going back to the beginning so you can get the total picture of what actually happened in 1965,” said Perry County Commissioner Alfred Turner Jr. “Without the events occurring in Marion, there’s no way you would have gotten the same results or the optics of Bloody Sunday.”
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose to throw its support behind the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and local groups that had been focusing on voter registration in Alabama, where they were holding protests, sit-ins and boycotts. Rollins had skipped the church meeting but heard the commotion, and when he went outside, “a lot of people were getting the hell beat out of them.”
Plans were made for the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, but on the day chosen, King was back home in Atlanta, and the federal observers who normally shadowed him and presumably would have served as a deterrent against violence weren’t there when hundreds of marchers with backpacks gathered at the bridge.A terrified Terrance Chestnut, 6 at the time, was there with his father, Selma civil rights attorney J.L. Chestnut Jr.
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